The crowd
group · 4 works · 4 mentions · 9 anchored passages
the crowd · the multitude · the throng · al-jumhūr · the herd · the many · the mob · the people · the vulgar · الجمهور
in the texts
Mukhtaṣar fī ʻilm al-nafs al-insānīyah
The assembled public, whose presence is used as the test that separates private competence from public capacity in the divergence of individual minds.
So we see a man who expounds sundry books in private yet before the crowd is incapable (2) of composing the meanest epistle;
Letters to Lucilius
The general mass of people whose company and approval Seneca counsels avoiding as corrupting.
A mind that is tender and not firm enough in the right must be withdrawn from the crowd;
These things, my Lucilius, must be laid up in the mind, that you may despise the pleasure that comes from the assent of the many.
do not become like the bad because they are many, nor an enemy to the many because they are unlike yourself.
On the Happy Life
The undifferentiated mass of people whose opinions and imitative behavior Seneca warns against as a guide to the happy life.
What happens in a great crush of people, when the crowd presses upon itself—no one falls without drawing another down with him, and those in front are the ruin of those who follow—this you may see happening throughout the whole of life.
And the more numerous and greater they are, the smaller is the man and the slave of the more masters, whom the crowd calls happy.
Nothing, then, is more to be guarded against than that we should not, after the manner of cattle, follow the herd of those who go before us, making our way not where we ought to go but where the crowd goes.
De Carnis Resurrectione
The common people, who mock belief in resurrection while still honoring the dead with funeral feasts.
" But when they say, "What is dead is dead," and "Live while you live," and "After death all things end, even death itself" — then I shall remember both that the heart of the crowd is accounted ash by God, and that the very wisdom of the world is pronounced foolishness.
but the crowd mocks, supposing that nothing remains after death.